I predict Altered Carbon will be hoovering up rewards this year
like a coke addict on holiday in Columbia. This
is a first novel so exciting, so addictive and so bone-crunchingly in
your face that it beggars the need for such virtual reality as it occasionally
employs.

Takeshi Kovacs is a former member of the Envoy Corps, peacemakers (in
that they will make you be peaceful) of the UN Protectorate,
the decidedly tyrannical ruling body of Earth and all the rest of her
interstellar colonies. The Envoys kick ass. Everybody is scared
of them, even the Protectorate itself, and they should know. So having,
ahem, left the Envoys, Kovacs is basically the 26th century equivalent
of a private dick, and Altered Carbon is more than a little reminiscent
of hardboiled noir. Everything, from Kovacs's ambiguous relationship
with the police to his visits to the home of his rich client, screams
'Raymond Chandler!' at you right from the start. This is a good
thing.

Kovacs's stored mind has been transmitted light years from his home
world following his traumatic death back to Earth and, sleeved in a
new body at the whim of a very rich man who killed himself last week,
with his last 24 hours of memories lost, he wants to know why. Unfortunately,
the immortal and immoral super-rich detest Kovacs' intrusion into their
extended lives, the police hate his employer's evasive lawyers, the
underworld hates everyone and the rest of the planet simply have their
own problems.

Altered Carbon is remarkably violent; I have no idea
what the final body count might be, but I know that it's high. However,
the violence, even the worst of it, works within the novel, alternately
raising the hackles and gladdening the heart as you read, and illustrating
the cheapness of life in a milieu where almost everybody backs up their
consciousness and those who can afford it are 'sleeved' in a new body
upon death (or merely boredom, if you're rich). There are big guns,
hard drugs, AIs based on Jimi Hendrix, Martians and some of the sexiest,
nastiest technology since Neuromancer, all set against a galactic
background of paranoia and fear.

This is what Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City should have been
but fell short of -- a ceaseless, permanently off-balance sprint through
an all-too-grimly-familiar future where miraculous technologies are
degraded through everyday use and abuse.

There are occasional throwaway mentions of background details here
that beg entire novels on their own; ubiquitous pieces of history dismissed
in single lines that had my nose twitching, scenting something far bigger
lurking, hidden under the surface. If Richard Morgan can use these to
even come close to repeating the harsh triumph of Altered Carbon
in his next novel then I would suggest we have another bona fide
UK sf triumph on our hands.

Go and get yourself a copy of Altered Carbon now, if
only to forestall other people telling you how much you need to read
this book.